The Female Wits is an important document to historians of the theatre, coming as it did at the very end of the Restoration period and just preceding the changes brought about by Collier's attacks upon the theatre which accelerated the establishment of sentimental comedy and tragedy. The play illuminates at least four areas about which we know very little: the personalities of the three women playwrights at the beginning of their careers, the excellent portraits of some of the little known players, the acting techniques that are parodied so broadly that it is possible to recognize the original practice, and the rehearsal customs and stage directions employed which give new light or confirm what is already known. Granted, all are outrageously exaggerated, but a discerning eye can detect the truth that lurks behind any satire, parody, or lampoon. That kernel of truth must be there, or there is nothing to laugh about.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] See the entry under Unknown Authors, Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1955), I, 441. Also see William van Lennep, The London Stage, 1660-1800 (Carbondale, 1965), Part I, 1660-1700, pp. 467-468.
Wing notes a 1697 edition, but an examination of the severely cropped copy of the 1704 edition at the Huntington Library gives the first clue for the creation of a ghost: the imprint was sacrificed to the Kemble-Devonshire insistence on uniformity in size, and a later hand supplied the conjectured date of presentation, not the date of publication. Noted as a questioned publication date in Woodward-McManaway, Check List (no. 374), the date of 1697 was next cautiously recorded in Nicoll (Ibidem) as a possible date for a first edition. It then entered the Wing Catalogue as the first edition, mistakenly making the 1704 the second edition.
[2] Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life (London, 1740), chaps. IV-VII.
[3] A Comparison between the Two Stages, ed. Staring B. Wells (Princeton, 1942), p. 17.
[4] See DNB; Paul Bunyan Anderson, "Mistress Manley's Biography," Modern Philology, XXXIII (1936), 261-278; Gwendolyn B. Needham, "Mary de la Riviere, Tory Defender," HLQ, XII (1948-49), 253-288; Needham, "Mrs. Manley, an Eighteenth-Century Wife of Bath," HLQ, XIV (1950-51), 259-284.
[5] Mary de la Riviere Manley, The Adventures of Rivella (London, 1714), p. 41.
[6] Cibber, p. 95.